Today is the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. To commemorate
the occasion we take a look at the debate over global warming.

A new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million dollars funding a
network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming.

We are joined on the line from WashingtonDC by Chris Mooney, the reporter
who broke the story. His article — “Some
Like It Hot” — appears in the May/June issue of Mother
Jones magazine. We are also joined on the line by Myron Ebell
of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one
of 40 organizations identified in the report that receives funding from
Exxon/Mobil. According to the article, CEI has received $1,380,000 dollars from
Exxon. And on the line from Massachusetts
we have journalist and author Ross Gelbspan. He also
has an article titled “Snowed”
in the latest issue of Mother Jones that explores why the U.S media pays
relatively little attention to the issue of global climate change.

Chris Mooney, a
freelance writer living in Washington,
D.C., and a senior
correspondent for the American
Prospect magazine. He focuses on issues at the intersection of
science and politics. His first book, “The Republican War on Science” will
be published in September.

Ross Gelbspan,
journalist and author. As special projects editor of the Boston Globe,
he conceived, directed and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1984. He is author of “The Heat is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate.”

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us
provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast.
Thank you for your generous contribution Donate — $25,
$50, $100,
more...

AMY GOODMAN: On the line from Massachusetts,
we have journalist and author, Ross Gelbspan. He has
an article in latest issue of Mother Jones that explores why the U.S.
media pays relatively little attention to the issue of global warming. We go
first to Chris Mooney, author of “Some Like It Hot.”
Can you talk about your investigation into who funds the groups that question
global warming?

CHRIS MOONEY: Sure. Amy, thanks for having
me. In this Mother Jones article, I essentially started out from the
premise which I knew, because I had had written on climate change before, that
there were a lot of organizations out there that were challenging what is
essentially the scientific consensus view that humans are causing global
warming or challenging other aspects of climate science. And what we did was
essentially a correlation or analysis where we looked at what the organizations
were saying in terms of what they were saying about climate science. And sure
enough, we found that a number of the organizations were actually receiving
funding from ExxonMobil.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who these organizations are?

CHRIS MOONEY: Well, by and large, they are — I would describe them as
think tanks and public policy groups, largely on the sort of — on the right
with free market principles, or sort of a more free market agenda. But, you
know, that’s one thing, but they’re actually arguing about in a lot of cases
the scientific content of whether global warming is happening, how serious it’s
going to be, what are the impacts, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: Ross Gelbspan, can you talk
about this debate around global warming?

ROSS GELBSPAN: I can, Amy. And again, thanks so much for giving this
subject the air time this morning. The very fact that you are using the word
debate shows how pervasive this campaign of disinformation and deception has
been. There really is no debate about global warming. What you have on the one
side are more 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the U.N. in what
is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in
history. What you have on the other side are basically a very small handful of
so-called greenhouse skeptics, the majority of whom have been paid by the coal
and oil industries, and for that reason, it has — because of the megaphone they
have been given by industry, they have created the impression in the minds of
journalists that it is really a debate, and as a result, most stories, until
recently, have portrayed it as a he said/she said kind of thing. And I think
the public basically took the attitude after a while, that, you know, come back
and tell us what you know when you make up your mind. And as a result, the
public has sort of turned off to this issue, even as the signals from the
planet are becoming very shrill, and the timetable for action is very slow and
narrow.

AMY GOODMAN: Myron Ebell, you’re with the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, as Chris Mooney says, one of the
organizations that receives a good deal of money, more than $1 million from ExxonMobil. can you respond to
what these authors have said?

MYRON EBELL: Well, you know, I — Chris Mooney, I don’t really have
much against his article, and I think he’s shown that there are a number of
groups that mostly, as he said, on the conservative side that oppose the Kyoto
Global Warming Treaty and oppose energy rationing policies. This is — it’s not
a surprise that Exxon funds them, because I think Exxon is one of the very few
corporations that posts all of its charitable
contributions to non-profit groups on its website. So, I think anybody who is
listening can go and look at those. Most corporations don’t. It would probably
be a good idea if they did. The — you know, this large megaphone that we have,
I’m a little bit surprised that Ross Gelbspan has
mentioned that, because, of course, the environmental movement, which largely
spends a lot of its effort supporting the Kyoto Protocol and energy rationing
policies is a huge industry. The Sacramento Bee a couple years ago,
maybe it’s three years ago now, estimated it was an $8.5 billion a year
industry. Now, a lot of that is local groups, but if you just take the big
groups, you see it’s about a $3 billion a year industry, just the big groups
here in Washington, D.C., which is, you know, a couple of orders of magnitude
larger than the effort on the conservative side on these issues. So, I don’t
think we’re winning this debate because we have a bigger megaphone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we’re going to come
back and have a discussion and debate on this issue. Our guests, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, author Ross Gelbspan, as well as Chris Mooney. Both have pieces in this
month’s edition of Mother Jones magazine on global warming. It’s the
35th anniversary of Earth Day. This is Democracy Now!

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, as we talk about global warming on this
35th anniversary of Earth Day, April
22, 1970, the first time it was celebrated. We’re joined on the
telephone right now from Washington,
D.C., by Chris Mooney. He’s the
author of a piece in Mother Jones magazine called, "Some Like It Hot." “Forty public policy groups have this in
common,” he writes. “They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that
humans are causing the earth to overheat, and they all get money from ExxonMobil.” Ross Gelbspan is
also with us, has a piece in that issue of Mother Jones called,
"Snowed." He is a well-known environmental writer. And joining us on
the line also from Washington
is Myron Ebell. He is with the Competitive Enterprise
Institute. And I wanted to ask Ross Gelbspan if you
can respond to Myron Ebell about this issue of global
warming and whether it really is a problem.

ROSS GELBSPAN: Well, before I respond as to whether it’s a problem,
Amy, I’d like it respond to what Myron said about the amount of money spent on
this disinformation campaign. I had figures a few years back — and when there
was a large organization called the Global Climate Coalition. It had 54
industry members. These were mostly representatives of the coal and oil and
auto and every manufacturing sector, and a few years ago, the last year for
which I had figures, the Global Climate Coalition spent millions and millions
of dollars on lobbying and public relations to say that climate [change] isn’t
happening. One member group of this 54 group organization, the A.P.I., paid
$1.8 million to a public relations firm on this issue, and by comparison, the
five biggest environmental groups that also focused on climate change spent a
total of $2 million, according to their own organizations. So there’s a huge
mismatch in terms of the financial issues that — the financial outlays in terms
of fighting this battle for reality, basically, and for the public perception.

But to step back for a second, when you are asking me how serious it is, the
head of this intergovernmental panel on climate change, Dr. RagendraPachauri, said recently that we have about a ten-year
window to make very, very deep cuts in our carbon fuel use, if, quote,
“humanity is to survive.” This is a scientist. He speaks normally in very
conservative and measured language. So, to hear that kind of talk is very, very
troubling. Just to give you one last quick example, scientists have documented
already the deep oceans are warming, the glaciers are melting, the icecaps are
falling apart. We’re seeing violent weather increase. We’re seeing a change in
the timing of the seasons. And all of that has happened from one degree of
warming. By contrast, we’re now looking to a century of three to ten degrees of
warming. So, I think the urgency is very, very important.

MYRON EBELL: Well, you want me to respond to that. I hope we can get
Chris back into this. Look, again, it’s easy to talk about big, bad industry
and how powerful it is. Yes, industries do spend a lot of money on P.R. and
lobbying, but if you are looking at the non-profit world which Chris Mooney’s
article does, we’re really just small potatoes, and in fact, Bill McKibben recognizes that in his article, also in Mother
Jones, when he calls us “a small group of clever and committed people,” and
says what we have done to turn the global warming debate is one of the most
mightiest political feats of our time. I think that may be a little
exaggerated, but then what Ross Gelbspan says about
global warming is very exaggerated. Dr. Pachauri, he’s a conservative, buttoned-down individual,
yeah. When he was in Denmark,
he called Bjorn Lomborg worse than Hitler. So, look,
so that’s how careful he is in his speech. The global warming debate has turned
from a scientific one where the I.P.C.C. publishes thousands of page reports
which by and large are extremely good, which several thousand scientists work
on. They do not all agree with the conclusions in the summary for policy
makers, which is, you know, three 20-page summaries written by governments.
These summaries then are abstracted by advocates for global warming alarmism to
say, “Oh, we’re going to have lots more big storms. We’re going to have lots
more this.” No, that isn’t what the report says. The report, the third
assessment report — I have it sitting here, it’s a huge document published by
Cambridge University Press — is not an alarmist document. And you can go
through and find some things that are alarming and a lot of reasons not to be
alarmed.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Mooney, would you like to respond?

CHRIS MOONEY: If I could jump in on that. I don’t think that that’s
actually a fair assessment of what the I.P.C.C. actually says. And I actually
have a quote here from the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. I’d just like
to read it to you, because what the National Academy said in 2001 is that the I.P.C.C.’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of
the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific
community on this issue. And I think that that’s really what’s at stake here.
And the NationalAcademy is essentially ratifying what
the I.P.C.C. had included in its summary for policymakers, I might add.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Mooney, you begin your piece by talking about the
anti-environmentalist novel by Michael Crichton, State of Fear. Can you talk about the
significance of this in popular culture and where you go from there?

CHRIS MOONEY: Well yes, I mean the scientific significance of it is
probably not nearly as significant as the role that it’s playing in terms of
giving those who are questioning both the scientific basis for action on
climate change and actually, you know, the economic
basis as well, something to rally around. I think that Michael Crichton has
become somewhat of a hero for what I would term the “skeptic camp” and also a
lot of the think tanks that are sort of part of that camp, and that is because
he’s a prominent author. He has at least some scientific credential in
medicine, not, obviously, in climate science. And he certainly has a megaphone.
And so these groups have sort of rallied to him. Meanwhile, the scientists who
are working in this area have been none too pleased with some of the statements
in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about his book, State of Fear, and the impact
that it has had, and what it is about, for those who have not read it?

CHRIS MOONEY: Oh, right, well, I mean, State of Fear, it’s a
novel, right? I mean, it’s a novel laden with footnotes and charts and notes
and author commentary that make it sort of a strange mélange of fact and
fiction. And in it, essentially environment groups conspire —because global
warming isn’t happening in the context of this book, environmental groups
conspire to make people think it’s happening by causing big disasters. So, you
know, a lot of people think it’s sort of wrong-headed, and I think that I would
probably agree with that.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. You also refer to Steven Milloy,
the columnist with FoxNews.com, who runs two groups out of his home that have
received $90,000 from ExxonMobil. What are these
groups?

CHRIS MOONEY: Well, essentially, we — you know, when we were going
through the list of organizations that were supported, we found two, and we
wanted to learn more about them. One of them was called the Advancement of
Sound Science Center, and one of them was called the Free Enterprise Action
Institute. And sure enough, we found that these were organizations that were
linked to Steven Milloy. And this is a commentator
who essentially debunks a wide range of sort of environmental, public health
and other concerns under the auspices of his JunkScience.com website, but also
in the media, including for FoxNews.com. And it wasn’t ever disclosed, at least
as far as we could tell. We didn’t see a case in which it was disclosed that
actually in some of the places where he’s debunking global warming concerns
that, actually, you know, he’s actually been receiving funding from a company
that obviously would have an economic stake in climate change policies.

AMY GOODMAN: And you spend almost two pages with a chart, “Put a
Tiger in Your Think Tank.” Since you’re very clear about naming names, if you
could go through these, as well as what you call the Cold Earth Society. Who
the people are that you single out?

CHRIS MOONEY: Actually, I mean, I didn’t actually write that chart. I
mean, that’s a part of the whole presentation, but I mean, I’m certainly happy
to talk about some of the organizations. We have Myron Ebell
on the line, so we can just, you know, we can start with the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, which is clearly one of the organizations that is most
prominent, I think, in sort of arguing both against climate change policies on
an economic level, which I think, you know, I just disagree with them maybe
about that, but actually on the scientific level then, I think it actually gets
into the area of being misleading, when the scientific basis is being
challenged and we have such a strong scientific consensus. So one of the things
that Myron’s group has done is challenging the U.S. National Assessment on
Climate Change, and they have actually gone to court to challenge this
document, which is a well regarded scientific report produced during the
Clinton Administration, and it’s actually been praised by the National Academy
of Sciences. Again, I will just quote again from the same NationalAcademy
report that I was quoting before, when it talked about the National Assessment,
it said, “It provides a basis for summarizing the potential consequences of
climate change.” And then it went on to base two pages of the National Academy
of Sciences report on this National Assessment report. So clearly, the National
Academy of Sciences doesn’t see it as being a particularly problematic or
troublesome document. So I’m talking specifically about attacks on the science
of climate change, not the economics which is something that people can argue
about.

AMY GOODMAN: Myron Ebell of Competitive
Enterprise Institute.

MYRON EBELL: Well, you know, I don’t think that the — to go back to
what Chris first said, I don’t think that the statement he read from the
National Academy of Sciences is alarming, and in fact, I don’t see much reason
to disagree with it. The fact is, it’s — there’s a sort of a tissue of — you
start with the premise that the climate is changing, and pretty soon, you are
talking about how scary it is. Well, the climate is changing all the time. The
impacts are significant. If you look at the United States, for example, there
is no warming or cooling trend if you average out the entire country. That’s
true for quite a long time going back into the past. However, there are
significant climate changes going on. The Pacific Northwest
is warming up. The Atlantic Southeast, Florida,
Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas,
are cooling down. These are long term trends, 30, 40
years. They’re very significant. They have costs. They have environmental
impact. And we have to deal with it. You can’t predict, on the basis of knowing
what the global mean temperature is and whether it’s going up or going down,
that the Pacific Northwest is warming up and
the Atlantic Southeast is cooling down. There’s no way to get that. So, again,
I think it’s — a lot of the alarmism is based on absolutely un-alarming
statements, which have been sort of whipped up into a frenzy by people who
really ought to know better.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ross Gelbspan, giving
you the last word.

ROSS GELBSPAN: Real briefly, what Myron is saying about temperatures
is really very, very misleading. 1998 was the hottest year on record, and 2001
replaced 1997 as number two. 2004 was the fourth hottest year on record. So,
globally what’s happening is that the planet is warming. And what we’re seeing
also is a much more unstable kind of climate with many more storms and more
changes and more surprises. We’re seeing shorter, more severe winters, which
will begin to take a much bigger toll on agriculture. There’s no question about
the larger trends of what’s happening in the climate, regardless of how you cut
it. And as the head of the I.P.C.C. said a couple of years ago, there is no
debate among any statured scientist at all about the
larger trends of what’s happening to the climate. So, I think that’s very
disingenuous. And I think it’s very important to understand again that we have
a really short time for action.

And I’ll go back to one study that was put out by a major group of
scientists and policymakers at the beginning of the year, which said that we
now have 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Traditionally that number was 280. When it reaches 400 parts per million, which
will be within the next 10-15 years, that correlates with an increase of 2
degrees Celsius in the average global temperature, and that is the point at
which a lot of impacts begin to sort of take on their own momentum and become
runaway impacts. So scientists are really concerned about
changes in the Gulf Stream, rapid temperature
changes, die-offs of the forests, all kinds of things like this, which will
begin to happen in a very, very short time if we keep pumping out all of these
carbon fuels. And this is not alarmism. This is from the scientific
community. And there is really no debate about what’s happening to the climate
among the mainstream body of climate scientists.

AMY GOODMAN: Ross Gelbspan,
we’ll have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us. As well, I
want to thank Myron Ebell of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and Chris Mooney. Both Chris Mooney and Ross Gelbspan have pieces in this month’s issue of Mother
Jones. The title of the issue, “As the World Burns.”